Release: 14.02.2023

NASTJA'S TEARS

  • A companion piece to the bestselling
    She Came from Mariupol – the story of one woman’s fate, here and now. 
  • She Came from Mariupol was awarded the Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2017 and translated into 11 languages.
  • Over 120,000 copies were sold of She Came from Mariupol and Somewhere in this Darkness.

On origin, the loss of home, and broken biographies. On friendship, comfort, and love.

When Natascha Wodin comes to Berlin in 1992, she needs someone to help her with the cleaning. From the applicants who respond to her ad, she chooses Nastja from Ukraine. It is the home country of Natascha Wodin’s parents, who were hauled off to Germany as victims of forced labour in the Second World War. Nastja, a civil engineer, found it impossible to make a living in the economic chaos that descended upon her country after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her last salary was paid in the form of a small bag of rice – too little to sustain her and her small grandson. And so, she boarded a train in the hope of finding a source of income. But when her visa expires, she slips into a life of illegality, becomes one of the many people who have gone underground in the jungle of the new German capital, which is still growing and expanding with little or no control.

For Natascha Wodin, it is as if fate has caught up with her again. Her relationship with Nastja develops more and more into a friendship, and the Ukrainian woman’s homesickness recalls that of Wodin’s own mother, who succumbed to it at a young age. Now, many years later, she uses restrained, deeply moving, poetic words to paint a portrait of Nastja, a woman who won’t give up. 

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Rights sold to

China - New Star Press | Denmark - Forlaget Silkefyret | Finland - Aviador | The Netherlands - Atlas Contact

  • Publisher: Rowohlt Taschenbuch
  • Release: 14.02.2023
  • 192 pages
  • ISBN: 978-3-499-00699-9
Cover Download Nastjas Tränen
Nastjas Tränen

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Julius Schrank / Agentur Focus

Natascha Wodin

Natascha Wodin was born in the Bavarian town of Fürth in 1945 to parents who had been used as forced labour. She grew up in the so-called DP camps for displaced persons, and after the early death of her mother was raised in a Catholic home for girls. 
Following her debut novel Die gläserne Stadt in 1983, Natascha Wodin went on to publish numerous works, including Nachtgeschwister and Irgendwo in diesem Dunkel. Her writings have been honored with prestigious awards such as the Hermann-Hesse Prize, the Brüder-Grimm Prize, and the Adelbert-von-Chamisso Prize. She received the Alfred-Döblin Prize, the Leipzig Book Fair Prize, and the Hilde-Domin Prize for Literature in Exile in 2019 for her work Sie kam aus Mariupol. In 2022, she was awarded the Joseph-Breitbach Prize for her entire body of work. Natascha Wodin currently lives in Berlin and Mecklenburg.